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OLEDs to match LED performance, says report

OLED panels will be on a par with LEDs in terms of performance by next year, according to a market report.

The report by UBI, a South Korean research company, said the OLED
lighting market will still be very small in 2015, but will be able to
match LED technology in terms of performance. The UBI forecast sees OLED
panels reaching 100lm/W and 30,000 lifetime hours by next year.

The
report suggested this would encourage quick growth in the OLED lighting
market and predicted that will reach $4.7 billion in 2020.

But when Lighting contacted manufacturers to ask whether they agreed with the findings of
the report, some felt OLED progress wasn’t quite as rapid. “Market
research is a difficult story,” said Karsten Diekmann, head of products,
applications and marketing in Oram’s OLED team. “It’s really hard to
tell what will be the case in five to 10 years from now.”

“Our key
year for performance is 2016, where we anticipate to break the 100lm/W
barrier and to be technically competitive with LED technology. We showed
a 65lm/W OLED at Lighting + Building this year, which is the same
performance of CFL; but sadly nobody is interested in the performance of
CFL. Everything is back to LED performance, which is the true
benchmark.”

But OLEDs are catching up fast. Diekmann went as far
as saying OLEDs are “developing twice as fast” as LEDs. Since 2010,
where Oram had OLED performances of 20lm/W and a lifetime of 5,000 hours
at L50, huge strides have been made. Today OLEDs are reaching 65lm/W
and 15,000 hour lifetimes at L70, with three times as much brightness as
before. “Comparing this to LEDs, you have to go back six or seven years
to see a doubling of the performance,” Diekmann added.

He also
pointed out that LED has a lot more losses than OLEDs do when it comes
to thermal and optics. Therefore OLEDs don’t need to be the same
efficacy at a component level, to perform as well as LEDs.

“Say
you have an OLED component with 100lm/W,” he explained, “and an LED
component with 130lm/W, and you built them into a system. Then you have
to consider optical means for the LEDs where you have optical losses,
and heat sinks for the thermal losses; so the system output it rather
comparable. So on a system level, we anticipate OLEDs being comparable
in two years.”

Pricing, however, is another matter. Diekmann
predicts OLEDs won’t be comparable on price with LEDs until at least
2018 or even 2020 – and this is dependent on market adoption in the
preceding years.

“The goal is clear,” he said. “OLEDs have to be
competitive in pricing in order to succeed in the lighting market. By
having a good technical performance two years from now won’t mean we can
start selling OLEDs for the same price. First we need premium projects,
new infrastructures, standardisation efforts; then you can start all
these economy of scale factors.”

Osram hopes the automotive
industry is going to drive the OLED market, and push the costs down for
general lighting market adoption. “We think the OEMs in the car industry
are desperately looking for possibilities to differentiate themselves
from others to create branding by lighting, to have a certain
fingerprint from their luminaires.” Diekmann said. “They will be the
first adopters of OLED technology. With this we can increase our
economies of scale and then move into the general lighting market with
OLEDs.”